Jaime Roldós

Jaime Roldós Aguilera (born November 5, 1940 in Guayaquil , † May 24, 1981 in a plane crash on Mount Huairapungo in the Celica canton of Loja province ) was an Ecuadorian lawyer, university professor and politician. He was President of Ecuador from August 10, 1979 until his death. Its political orientation can be characterized as social democratic with populist features.

Career

Jaime Roldós was born in Guayaquil and attended the prestigious Colegio Nacional Vicente Rocafuerte , which he graduated as the best high school graduate of his year. He then studied law and social sciences at the Universidad de Guayaquil and graduated with honors. He then worked as a lawyer and as a university lecturer at the Universidad Laica Vicente Rocafuerte and the Universidad Católica de Santiago de Guayaquil in Guayaquil. During his youth he was a leading member of official school and student councils, after graduation he took on honorary positions in lawyers and university lecturers. In 1962 he married Marta Bucaram Ortíz, niece of the influential Lebanese-born politician Assad Bucaram , with whom he had two daughters and a son.

In 1967 Jaime Roldós was elected to Congress for the Bucaram-led social democratic-populist party Concentración de Fuerzas Populares (CFP, German Collection of People's Forces ). After its dissolution in 1970 by President José María Velasco Ibarra , Roldós was re-elected to parliament in 1970.

In 1976 he was appointed by the military junta, which President Guillermo Rodríguez Lara had deposed, to the second commission for the reform of the Ecuadorian constitution and the electoral law, which existed until 1977.

Presidential elections 1978/79

After the new constitution had been adopted by referendum on January 15, 1978, elections were called for July 16, 1978. The election administration ( Tribunal Supremo Electoral ), dominated by the military junta, banned the candidacy of the clear favorite Assad Bucaram due to a short-term electoral law that prevented non-native Ecuadorians from exercising the presidency. As a result, Jaime Roldós, originally envisaged as a candidate for Guayaquil Mayor, was named as a presidential candidate for Bucaram's CFP. He ran together with Osvaldo Hurtado from the Christian Democratic Partido Demócrata Cristiano as a vice-presidential candidate. The main opposing candidate was the architect and incumbent mayor of Quito, Sixto Durán Ballén from the Partido Social Cristiano (German Social-Christian Party ), who stood for an eleven-party union of right and center-right parties.

Roldós and Hurtado received the highest percentage of votes in the first ballot on July 16, 1978 with almost 32 percent, but had to run in a runoff election because they did not achieve an absolute majority. The opposing candidate was the runner-up in the first round, Durán Ballén. The runoff election did not take place until April 29, 1979, as supporters of the country's conservative elites feared an election victory for Roldó, who had started a program of social reforms, and a. accused his party of election fraud, but this turned out to be unproven. In the runoff election, Roldós emerged as the winner with more than 68.5 percent of the vote.

Presidency

Roldós was sworn in as president on August 10, 1979, the Ecuadorian national holiday, and ruled as the leader of a coalition made up of CFP, the Hurtado-led Democracia Popular (a pre-election successor to the Partido Demócrata Cristiano) and independents. His presidency ended when Roldós was killed in a plane crash on May 24, 1981 (see below).

Vice-President Osvaldo Hurtado succeeded him. He appointed León Roldós , a brother of the late President, to succeed him as Vice President.

government

The Roldós government implemented numerous programs, some of which had already been formulated, on state housing, school meals and literacy campaigns in order to improve the situation of the poor sections of the population and alleviate their poverty.

In terms of economic policy, Roldós pursued a modernization and development program using state framework planning (see Planification ), which his government formulated and sought to implement through a development plan adopted in 1980. Energy policy was an important part of this program : Roldós promoted the use of natural resources by building hydroelectric power stations and wanted to reorganize the exploitation and use of the country's oil reserves.

In January 1981, the Peruvian-Ecuadorian border war broke out , a skirmish over disputed border areas between the two countries, which the OAS was able to bring to an end, even though the underlying conflict was only resolved in the 1990s.

Opposition in parliament

Already during the election campaign Roldós had largely freed himself from the political patronage of Assad Bucaram and showed an independent, social reform profile in his politics.

The alienation of Bucaram, who had been elected president of the congress, and the broad front of the right-wing conservative opposition parties led by the Partido Social Cristiano led to permanent disputes between the president and parliament, in which laws were partly passed due to numerous independent and alternately voting MPs that were not in line with the President's political program. For example, laws on large wage increases, pension entitlements and the 40-hour week were passed by parliament, which Roldós saw as populist but not effective in reducing poverty (since they actually favored large, capital-intensive companies), but nevertheless signed.

In 1980 Roldós and his followers founded their own party Pueblo, Cambio y Democracia (German people, change and democracy ). In the following years he succeeded in pulling various members of the government and MPs of the CFP into his camp, especially after Bucaram's party suffered defeats in local elections in 1981. Bucaram himself was replaced as Congress President in 1981 by Raúl Baca, a candidate from the more Roldós-friendly Izquierda Democrática (German Democratic Left ) party. This defused the crisis between parliament and government.

Death from plane crash

Jaime Roldós was killed in a plane crash during the 22nd month of his presidency while en route from Quito , where he had presided over the national celebrations for the 159th anniversary of the Battle of Pichincha , to Zapotillo near the border with Peru, where he wanted to attend celebrations on the same occasion. The military aircraft that Roldós was carrying (an Avro ) crashed into a mountain in the province of Loja. In addition to Roldós, all other passengers (his wife Marta, the defense minister major general Marco Subia Martínez and his wife and two other military personnel) and the three crew members were killed.

The circumstances and the cause of the plane crash have not yet been finally clarified and provide material for conspiracy theories. The American entrepreneur John Perkins stated in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man , published in 2004, that Roldós - like Panamanian President Omar Torrijos shortly afterwards - was murdered because his plan to reorganize the hydrocarbon sector had the American interests in the Ecuadorian Threatened oil. Similar theories had previously been expressed and published in public several times.

The responsible investigative authority, the Junta Investigadora de Accidentes of the Ecuadorian Armed Forces , blamed human error on the pilot for the death. At the urging of supporters of Roldós' and relatives of the victims, the Ecuadorian parliament set up another commission, which found contradictions and inconsistencies in the first investigation report, but did not come to any clear opposite conclusions. The most significant new finding was obtained through an expert opinion from the Zurich City Police , who found that the aircraft's engines were not working when it hit Mount Huairapungo.

Political successor

Abdalá Bucaram , brother-in-law of Jaime Roldós (brother of his wife Marta), founded the populist party Partido Roldosista Ecuatoriano (PRE; German Roldosist Ecuadorian Party ) in 1982 , for which he was elected mayor of Guayaquil in 1984 and President of Ecuador in 1996.

Jaime's brother León Roldós , most recently rector of the Universidad de Guayaquil, ran as a presidential candidate in 1992, 2002 and 2006:

• In 1992, as leader of the Partido Socialista Ecuatoriano (PS, German Socialist Party of Ecuador ), he took sixth place in the first ballot.
• In 2002 he entered the presidential elections as an independent candidate with a small own election platform ( Movimiento Ciudadano Nuevo País ) outside of his PS, who had not committed to the nomination of Roldos'. With 15.4 percent in the first ballot, it received the third most votes and again failed to reach the second ballot.
• In the 2006 elections, he was a candidate for an alliance of his new movement Red Ética y Democracia with the social democratic Izquierda Democrática and achieved the fourth most votes with 14.8% in the first ballot.

Web links

• Description of Jaime Roldós' life and presidency by Humberto Oña Villarreal (Spanish)
• Description of the life and presidency of Jaime Roldós' by Simón Espinosa Cordero at edufuturo.com, an educational portal of the Pichincha province (Spanish)

predecessor	Office	successor
Alfredo Poveda Burbano	President of Ecuador 1979 - 1981	Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea